We Were Shot Down After All
submitted by: Alva Leon Matheson
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Langton himself had several narrow escapes from injury, both in the air and on the ground. During one flying mission he was slightly wounded by a small-arms round which hit the inside collar of his flakjacket, spun around the collar, and lodged just under the skin of his neck. He pulled the bullet out, which was so hot that it burnt his fingers and caused him to drop it inside the aircraft cockpit, where it was lost.
Even when he was not airborne, Langton’s war was far from quiet. He still recalls a mortar attack on Dau Tieng which began while he was playing cards with a group of American pilots. Used to these frequent interruptions to camplife, his companions did not break off the game as the enemy rounds continued to fall ever closer – but paused only to casually don a helmet or flak jacket. When a mortar bomb exploded at the far end of the building, Langton dived for cover under a nearby bed, only to be reminded by one of the Americans, ‘Hey, it’s your hand!’.
Langton directed some unusual missions with a diverse range of aircraft, including ‘arc light’ strikes by giant B-52 bombers and a number of AC-47 Spooky gunship attacks. One of the more significant such actions occurred on the night of 4 December 1969, when he worked with a pair of A-37 fighter/bombers. The A-37 was not a spectacular aircraft, but it could carry a very useful load of ordnance. On this particular night FSB Apollo had been partially overrun by the NVA, and by the time Langton arrived in his OV-10 Bronco the situation was clearly desperate.
As soon as the A-37s arrived overhead the American infantry retired to the protection of their bunkers, while Langton – with the ground commander’s concurrence – brought napalm and repeated gunnery attacks on positions inside the base itself. The NVA troops, caught in the open by this unexpected turn of events, suffered heavy casualties and those who survived fled back into the jungle. By this irregular form of defence the Americans maintained control of their somewhat charred base.
The Australian FAC also had the somewhat unusual (and unpleasant) experience of having an F-5 fighter/bomber crash on target after being hit by ground fire while under his direction. In another incident, an LOH-6 helicopter which was co-operating with Langton’s Bronco was shot down into the jungle while conducting a bomb damage assessment. In both instances the aircrews were killed.
Langton’s very active tour of duty reached its climax on 8 February 1970. On this date, at about 1400 hours, an American two-man LRRP which had been operating close to the Cambodian border requested immediate extraction. This was not in accordance with the plan for the operation, and indicated that an unexpected situation had arisen. The agreed plan was for the team, which had been inserted two days previously, to observe enemy troop movements and to remain concealed until any enemy had passed. On this occasion the pair inadvertently found themselves in the middle of an entire NVA regiment which was withdrawing into its Cambodian sanctuary. With discovery seemingly inevitable, under the circumstances the local American commander agreed that an extraction attempt should be made.
Langton knew of the LRRP activities and suspected that the patrol might run into trouble. Consequently he was not surprised when called upon to support their extraction attempt. Shortly after the alarm was raised, he took off from Dau Tieng’s small airstrip in his Bronco with Captain Tom Coker of the US Army in the back seat. For several months the Australian had promised his soldier friend a ride in his aircraft, but until then the opportunity had not arisen. Later, Coker would wish that he had never gone along ‘just for the ride’.
Due to the large concentration of enemy troops in the area it was imperative not to disclose the location of the friendlies until the last possible moment. Accordingly, the Bronco remained at an altitude of 8,000 feet and several kilometres away from the extraction point while the pilot arranged artillery support and for a ‘stack’ of four F-100s and four A-37s to be on hand. A US Army LOH-6 helicopter was airborne to support the FAC, as were a team of Huey (Iroquois) troop helicopters which were to make the actual extraction.
Under Langton’s directions the artillery commenced firing, its barrage forming a partial box around the LRRP’s members. After the Australian placed smoke, the F-100s attacked with high explosive bombs and napalm to seal the friendlies within a ring of fire. The extraction helicopters were on their final approach and Langton was in the process of guiding the first pair of A-37s onto the target when, without warning, the Bronco’s controls froze at an altitude of 1,400 feet. The aircraft started spinning earthwards and attempts to regain control proved futile.
After sending the terse radio message “We’re ejecting”, the pilot ‘command-ejected’ his passenger and then ejected himself. Both officers
left the aircraft at below 1,000 feet, with Coker’s ejection occurring while the Bronco was banked on one side and Langton’s while the aircraft was actually upside down. Both officers’ parachutes worked correctly but, due to the angle in flight of the aircraft at the time of his ejection, Langton’s parachute was inverted, with the result that the shroud lines were across his throat and choking him until he managed to clear them. Otherwise, the ejection worked perfectly!
As the two fliers descended, some distance apart, gunfire could be heard coming up through the jungle. At this time Langton noticed that Coker was slumped in his parachute harness and appeared to be dead (in reality he had only been stunned in the ejection). Fearing that the enemy would appear in the jungle beneath him, the Australian drew his 9 mm Browning pistol before he reached the ground. After crashing through some small trees, he found himself suspended a few metres above the ground in his parachute harness. Wasting no time, he released himself and took cover in the scrub where he used his emergency radio transmitter to establish contact with the A-37 crews, who by this time had changed targets and were in the process of laying covering fire around the downed aviators’ position. On the ground a lot of small-arms fire could be heard, although it appeared that little, if any, was being directed at Langton.
The LOH-6 which had earlier been co-operating with the Bronco sighted Langton in the secondary jungle, and descended until it was actually flying below the treeline. Weaving between the trees under a hail of gunfire, the small helicopter raced to where Langton lay. The LOH- 6 was so low, in fact, that he was able to grab hold of the machine’s skids as it roared past and upwards. Despite his precarious position outside the helicopter, all seemed set for a brilliant rescue. At an altitude of 60 feet, however, the LOH- 6 shuddered under the impact of bullets, lost power, and plummeted to the ground. Langton let go of the doomed machine at about 30 feet and dropped to the ground, his fall being broken by tree branches, while the aircraft landed almost on top of him.
The Australian, who miraculously was still uninjured, now found himself assisting his two would-be American rescuers from the wreckage of their helicopter. What he did not then know was that the first crewman he pulled out was not a regular airman, but a young orderlyroom clerk who was virtually blind without his ‘coke- bottom glasses’ which had been lost in the crash. Thrusting a weapon from inside the aircraft into the crewman’s hands, to provide cover against any approaching enemy, Langton moved off to collect the pilot. While helping the latter he felt the hairs on the back of his neck begin to rise, and he turned around to find that the semi-blind and disoriented ‘gunner’, having seen blurry movement, was about to open fire on them.
After Langton had remained in a defensive position near the LOH- 6’s remains with the two-man crew for about 20 minutes, Huey rescue helicopters arrived and winched the airmen out of the jungle. They were then flown back to Dau Tieng without further incident. In the midst of all this activity, Tom Coker and the LRRP team had also been recovered unharmed.
After a quick medical check, Langton was flown out to Bien Hoa for an intensive debriefing by American intelligence personnel. To these listeners he expressed the view that, owing to the lack of explosion or fire, he felt that the Bronco’s loss had been due to a control malfunction, not enemy ground fire. The Americans were not pleased to hear that their aircraft may have been defective, and told him most firmly that he had indeed been shot down and that that was to be the end of the matter.
A detailed technical check of the Bronco’s wreckage to confirm the pilot’s theory was not possible, as the crash site could not be secured from the enemy for that long. Also, the aircraft had been fitted with the top-secret KY28 decoder, an item of equipment which allowed the pilot to use other UHF and VHF radio channels without fear of the transmission being intercepted by the enemy. Because this device was present in the downed Bronco, air strikes were shortly afterwards ordered on the crash site to ensure that this sensitive piece of equipment did not fall into enemy hands.
Langton returned to Dau Tieng the day after being shot down. That afternoon he was airborne again on a mission lasting two hours and 20 minutes, supporting American troops in a heavy contact with the enemy. At the end of this mission he was grounded for seven days, to allow time for throat injuries he sustained during his parachute descent (and which had emerged as a delayed reaction) to heal properly. Soon afterwards he was transferred south to Lai Khe, where he saw out the remainder of his tour of duty.
In all, Langton completed 549 hours of operational flying in Vietnam, in which he flew 227 missions as a FAC. Apart from being undoubtedly one of the luckiest allied pilots to survive Vietnam, Langton had also made Australian history by being the first and only RAAF FAC to lose an aircraft during that conflict.
There is an interesting postscript to the story of Langton’s downing and rescue, concerning the belief which he held for many years afterwards that his OV-10 Bronco was not a victim of ground fire but of a control defect. During a visit to Denver, Colorado, some twenty years later, Langton met up with Tom Coker, his American friend who was in the back seat on the day of the incident. Langton recalls:
For a number of reasons I wasn’t inclined towards the shoot-down theory, and even though the LRRPs were calling fire at the time I wasn’t convinced. Coker told me quite a tale, however. It seems he was wearing his West Point class ring when he got into the aircraft, even though I’d told him that he would have to take it off for our flight. Since it was still on his finger when he was strapped in, he slipped it off and jammed it behind the panel. Several years after the war, he received a visit from a company commander of another infantry unit who had been inserted into the area of our incident on the day that it actually happened. This officer (who was known to both of us) had been told we were captured or dead and was sent to inspect the wreckage of our aircraft. On his later visit, this guy presented Coker with his class ring – minus a couple of pieces – which he had retrieved that day. He also said there were several .30 cal bullet holes neatly stitched behind the rear seat and along the fuselage. We hadn’t felt any impact, but there you go – we were shot down after all. It all fitted together, because the plane was at about 90 degree left bank when things started to happen.